January 2012 Archives

Why don't schools routinely tap their best teachers to organize and deliver custom-tailored professional development to their peers?

Interesting question.

It seems like a no-brainer, actually. It's standard operating procedure for most professions--the master litigator advising and modeling for researchers just out of law school, the CPA counseling junior partners about weathering tax season--or bright newbies offering training on technology tools veterans haven't yet utilized.

There was a mini-conversation at Twitter over this question:

@BreaktheCurve (Craig Jerald): Never been able to figure out why teachers don't revolt & protest against time-wasting PD.

@TeacherBeat (Stephen Sawchuk, of Education Week): I wrote a whole series on this last year. PD terrible, districts don't even know what they spend on it

@Csousanh: (Chris Sousa) Cycle school's expert teachers as this, 1/2 teach load keeps them fresh. It's cheaper, can build trust and confidence too.

@nancyflanagan: Nearly 100,000 NB Certified teachers are anxious (and vetted) to serve as coaches. Just for starters.

@TeacherBeat: So why aren't districts using them?

Well....lots of reasons. And the question applies to all those with recognized signals of teacher proficiency, not just National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs).

First--it must be said that some progressive school leaders do regularly seek out teacher expertise and leadership in building a community of highly skilled educators. It's not unknown. But it's not part of the traditional school culture; the idea represents a sea change in ordinary practice and thinking.

Teachers typically don't determine and access their own professional learning needs. They're learning and growing all the time, of course--but their formal development is marked by credits, units and workshops: seat time.

There is a dominant mindset that Professional Development (caps intentional) is something delivered to teachers, rather than cultivated by them, as practitioners striving to improve their practice. Professional Development assumes that someone knows better than a teacher.

Who is that someone? Often, it's an administrator, a curriculum or human resources director. I'd be the first to say that these are necessary jobs--curriculum and instruction are the core purpose of schooling, after all--but central office administrators have a tendency to "know best" when it comes to teacher development. Because it's what they were hired to do, and are held accountable for.

This involves a level of suspicion and mistrust-- the administrative monitoring function kicks in. Will teachers really learn something new if it's not fed to them by a talking head in front of a room? Would they waste time, if it wasn't structured for them?

In my district, this boiled down to a fight over whether "working in their rooms" could constitute valid teacher professional development. Would teachers take this time to simply get out from under their accrued paperwork and grading? How would administrators monitor and evaluate teacher behavior? How would they know that teachers had learned?

Actually, uninterrupted time to get organized is an incredibly rare and valuable commodity to American teachers. Especially if it frees a teacher up to read professionally at home, research new ideas on the Web, prepare materials for a demonstration, or meet with other 5th grade teachers after school to talk about good writing prompts.

All of which are also "professional development," BTW.

There can also be a false elitism around teacher-led professional development--the "who does she think she is?" syndrome. While teachers are perfectly willing to swipe good ideas and practices shared by colleagues in the lunchroom, a teacher who's put his reputation on the line for a respected credential standing in front of the room violates some teachers' sense of egalitarianism. Here's another way to think about it: Are NBCTs promoting their own expertise in self-created PD opportunities? If not--why not?

There are really two big factors at play here. Number one, teachers aren't considered true professionals--and policy is leading us further away from a professional work model. We're still talking about "training" teachers, rather than drawing on their wisdom.

Finally--probably the most significant reason--professional development is an education market. What would happen if teacher development happened internally, entirely site-based and tailored to particular schools and populations? It would require demonstrated, deep teacher expertise in instruction and curricular issues. Which could shift the balance of power. And it would cost very little.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Who speaks for public education?

Policy-makers, who set change in motion with mandates and incentives designed to get them re-elected? School leaders, who find themselves administering policy "solutions" that actually get in the way of what leaders believe is best for the school community they're leading?

Teachers, whose autonomy, professional judgment and organizations are denigrated daily? Parents, who are deeply invested in educational outcomes, but seldom asked for their perspectives on core issues of teaching, learning and decision-making?

Or --do we get our impressions about public schools from the media?

Where do we--as a nation-- get our ideas and beliefs about education?

• A friend works in the admissions office of a small, well-regarded liberal arts college striving to build an intellectually strong, diverse pool of students. In office chit-chat, she mentions that she is having trouble connecting to a particular high school's guidance department for a needed piece of information. Oh, says a colleague. Public school, right?

• A fellow organizer at IDEA is invited to a "parent advocacy" meeting, designed to train parents in "grass-roots influence" on education policy in their state. He wonders why parents need a three-day training to express their desires about good schooling for their children. Who's behind this "free" training, which includes "developing a constituency" and "delivering winning messages?"

• A neighbor confides that she thinks the schools in our district are meeting the needs of all three of her children. I know a lot of people in [our small town] think the schools are bad, she says--but I just don't see it. My kids had good, caring teachers, the curriculum seems reasonable, the principals are responsive--what am I missing?

Who speaks for public education?

After a recent blog where I challenged longtime Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews' belief that there exists a "best" lesson plan for each subject, several friends noted that Mathews, for better or worse, was widely seen as a respected authority on education.

Yesterday, Juan Williams posted a blog at The Hill, on the continuing downslide of public education, a fact-free paean to market-based education policy, in honor of "National School Choice Week." (And who instituted School Choice week?) Williams described Race to the Top as offering federal money to "school systems willing to use the latest proven strategies for improving student performance." Ironic, since most school systems are dying to use genuinely proven strategies--plenty of highly skilled instructors and ample new resources, for example-- rather than unproven strategies like test prep and merit pay. Williams:

Better schools will result if parents have more control over how tax dollars are spent on education. That means bipartisan, coast-to-coast support for charter schools, vouchers and anything else that introduces competition and innovation into a stultified, failing education system.

Juan hasn't been reading the research, evidently. Or Finnish Lessons.

But his spiel has the feeling of familiarity, of casually expressed conventional wisdom. It's what a fair segment of the general public is now saying about public education--that it's failed. That the only credible solution is to abandon state and local investment in all that is "school"--buildings, curriculum, programs, human and material capital--and start over with a market-decides focus.

Contrast Williams' lazy, pre-fab appraisal with these words from Richard Rothstein, buttressed by decades of NAEP data:

Assuming systemic failure to justify a frenzy of ill-considered reforms, we've spent almost no time investigating what caused these trends. We can only speculate. Rather than spending such energy imagining how schools have failed, so we can fix them, we might devote attention to investigating what schools have done well, so we can do more of it.

Whose voice is the loudest? The researcher, the politician, the media "authority?" Or the people who are invested, who have first-hand contact with public schools every day?

Who speaks for public education?

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 6:56 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest blogger Corey Gaber is a first-year resident in a new teacher training and certification program called Urban Teacher Center, teaching middle school Humanities at Baltimore Freedom Academy, a social justice-themed Baltimore City Public School. He has an M.Ed in Mind, Brain and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is a Community Organizer for IDEA (Institute for Democratic Education in America).

"What percentage of NFL players are black?" I ask twelve boys in a summer program designed for students in danger of being retained at their recently completed grade level. We estimate about 75%. "OK, and what percentage of NFL owners do you think are black?" No need to guess here, the right answer is zero. The conversation is designed to provide students a content base for writing a Brief Constructed Response (commonly referred to as a "BCR").

Now that the issue of race has been raised the conversation veers away from football. A curious student asks me, "if we walked by each other on the street [he is black and I am white] and you called me a n***** could you go to jail for that? Or if I called you a cracker could I get arrested?"

Other students' heads perk up, waiting for my answer. There is a rich discussion to be had about First Amendment rights and the freedoms and limitations of speech in our society. At this moment the entire class is engaged and excited to learn about civics. But we have strayed too far off topic so the lead teacher tells us, "pull out a piece of paper and begin writing your BCR silently."

Articles are written every year bemoaning the fact that young Americans are woefully ignorant about civics. Here's a radical theory to consider: Young people don't know civics because we don't teach them civics! We made a decision in that moment with those twelve boys that practice with writing a brief constructed response was of higher value than becoming competent, prepared, participatory citizens. Does that decision mesh with your own values?

The instructor was no mindless drill-and-kill caricature. But our class time together was finite and the students had a final test fast approaching with multiple BCRs on it. The program evaluators look at the results of that test to determine whether or not to re-hire teachers from the summer before. Although the instructor would likely say that civics is more important than BCRs, the weight of the final exam (which had no questions about civics on it) was used to gauge his effectiveness as a teacher, and therefore his future employment pushed his actions in another direction.

What we choose to evaluate creates a set of pressures which shape teachers' actions and thus the daily experience of our students in school. This is not necessarily a bad thing, assuming that the evaluation system is aligned with our highest values. I have no problem being held stringently accountable for ensuring that my students understand the laws of our land, our system of government, and their power and responsibilities as citizens. But my job has never been on the line based on my students' abilities to obey the social contract when it is just--and to take non-violent action to alter the contract when it is unjust.

I have never been asked by an administrator how the work in my class will help to create informed and powerful citizens that can boost the health of our democracy. But isn't that the point of public education? If not that, then what? Shouldn't we come to some consensus about the goal before we create the means towards that end?

It's no surprise that evaluate has the word value in it, but it is surprising that there is no conversation in schools about whether the values embedded in our tests actually match the values of our school communities.

As new federal legislation is on the horizon that will replace NCLB, right now would be a wonderful time for students, teachers, administrators, and families to have that conversation and to make their voices heard. Let's teach our children civics by being active citizens ourselves.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

During my thirty-year career in the classroom, I occasionally worked with colleagues who resisted the contractual requirement that they turn in weekly lesson plans. As veteran teachers, they felt that detailed planning on paper was mindless hoop jumping. According to them, good teachers could step into a class, all their knowledge and skills percolating, and proceed to do the right things, without having to rely on notes. Good teaching as natural artistry.

Never worked for me. Early in my career, I developed the habit of planning on Sunday night for the week to come. The planning was nit-picky and thorough in the early years; in the last half of my career, I had a full tool bag to work with, which made thinking ahead and getting organized much easier. But still essential.

Perhaps a dozen times in my 30-year career I went to school on Monday without plans, trusting I could wing it. And every one of those days was painful.

I eventually started using yellow legal pads to plan, because I needed more space than the standard-issue planbook allowed. I still have the planning pads from my last few years of teaching. Although they're full of great ideas for teaching music, they would be useless to anyone else. Not only because I had my own shorthand and didn't have to explicate each lesson--but for the reason that I wrote the plans to address the learning needs of specific children at a particular time.

Lesson plans are not one size fits all.

In December, Jay Mathews wondered why schools don't provide new teachers with "the best lesson plan possible for each subject." He introduces readers to promising Teach for America corps members, who were "told where to find good material," and (no surprise) provided with sample items from the statewide assessments. But-- "beginning teachers still had to construct their lessons from scratch, as teachers have done for centuries."

Jeff Wetzler, Teach for America's executive vice president of teacher preparation, support and development, showed me a 2010 survey of the organization's beginning teachers in 31 states and the District. Forty-one percent said their districts provided them with low-quality instructional tools like lesson plans, or none at all. Twenty-seven percent were provided with tools they were required to use, and 7 percent got tools that they used because their colleagues used them. Only 15 percent said they were provided tools that they used freely because they were of such high quality.

At this point, I see veteran teachers around the country shaking their heads. (Hello? You didn't realize that constructing lesson plans for your students is part of the job of being a professional teacher? Too bad.) But the issue is much larger.

First, what Jay is talking about here is not a lesson plan--it's a learning activity. Planning lessons involves selecting and sequencing content, choosing activities appropriate for your students, sampling their learning through on-the-spot assessment. There are single-day lessons and arcs of lesson planning involving exposition, exploration, extension and review of a particular concept or skill. Good lesson planning is a blend of deeply understanding a curricular discipline, choosing effective activities--from lectures to demonstrations to rough drafts-- then checking for understanding, perhaps re-doing certain bits. And always keeping the particular students you're teaching in mind, using what happened in class today to make tomorrow's lesson more effective.

Best case scenario, this work is done in collaboration with skilled colleagues who serve the same kids, who share what's worked for them. Over time, a teacher might expect to develop their own tool bag full of high-quality activities and strategies. This never-ending tinkering with instruction and curriculum is called building an effective practice. It's challenging intellectual work, entirely dependent on teachers' commitment to experimenting, then paying attention to their results.

There is no such thing as the optimum, all-purpose lesson plan for any particular concept. There are websites and books filled with suggested activities to teach or reinforce a concept, but it's the teacher's job to select promising strategies, based on her knowledge of the students in front of her. "Teacherpreneurs" who sell their lesson plans are simply marketing activities and assessments that worked for them--but those may worthless for different instructors and students.

Mathews persists:

Many teachers, and the organizations that represent them, don't want ready-made lesson plans. They feel it limits their creativity and turns them into robots doing whatever their department head or the district curriculum chief wants.

Wrong. It's not about squelching "creativity." It's about being forced to teach in ways that don't acknowledge students' unique needs. It's about demeaning teachers' judgment, even scripting their speech. Teachers want a steady supply of good ideas for teaching, but they also want the responsibility of choosing the best strategies for their own classrooms.

There's an old joke about the deadwood teacher who taught the same year 30 times. Kind of ironic, now, at a time when we think we can standardize lesson plans and everything else about schooling.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I spent much of the past week in Louisiana, working with the teachers at a turnaround school there. I've written about this school before--their struggle to build genuine trust and teamwork when a brand new staff is constructed of enthusiastic beginners, battle-weary returnees who know the community well and skilled veterans looking for a challenge who volunteered to transfer in. When I was there last summer, the school was uninviting (to say the least) and the staff was sticking a tentative toe into honest collaboration.

What a difference five months makes. The most obvious evidence is shiny floors, new window blinds, student work on the walls, and people who call each other by name. In fact, the teachers use an automatic honorific in addressing each other--Ms. Thompson calls her colleague Ms. Adams, even in a two-day, adults-only professional development workshop where everyone's lounging around in jeans and Who Dat? sweatshirts. This is rigid federal turnaround policy wrapped in King cake and LSU purple and gold.

The thrust of our work was on creating learning experiences that touched every child. How do we build lessons that go deep, into the place where school learning shapes motivation? A special education teacher shared a story about being selected to play the Holy Virgin in her school Christmas play--and how that experience literally changed her life, making her feel exceptional and sending her on a path toward a preferable future.

She described her mother making a costume pattern from paper bags and sewing the blue satin robe with "jewels" at the neckline, the Lower Ninth Ward version of Mary. There was a lot of joking (How can we fail with the Virgin Mary on staff!?)--but it was a powerful story of, well, turnaround and choice. Special is good.

I hope you have pictures of that, people exclaimed. "I did," she said. "I still had the costume, too. But I lost them. In Katrina."

The story was a good framework for discussing ways to enrich the learning and lives of all the children entrusted to these teachers. The school, like all turnarounds, will be repeatedly monitored for three years. The monitors came for the first time in December, and their initial report arrived right before the two-day workshop: a few plaudits (for engaging parents) and a number of frustrating critiques and markdowns (for not putting up mandated writing curriculum posters).

From a cynical conversation with the fourth grade teachers, who spent a half-day generating productive, cool ideas for teaching writing to the kids whose strengths and deficiencies in language arts they now know intimately: Yeah. That poster is really going to fix their writing, all right.

Cynical comment from three different work groups: It's like the monitors are desperately searching for reasons to show how we're failing!

The report chastises school leaders for not putting up the required Data Wall near the entryway to the school. Actually, there is a rather comprehensive Data Wall, in the teachers' lounge, but monitors must elevate precise obedience to regulation over what matters. The principal says clearly: I want the entrance to this school to generate feelings of welcome, pride and progress. The data isn't particularly useful to the parents and grandparents who come to school--but it does have value and meaning to the teachers.

What issues are worth digging in your heels? Are there times when it's OK to concede to "reform" even when you know it's counterproductive? How many times do we tell children they're failures before they agree, and check out of the system entirely?

Conversations--even some gentle arguments--bubble up on the last afternoon. Teachers tip their hands about core beliefs and their aggravations about the year so far-- and they're not always coming from the same perspective. But they do have a common mission, a combination of a big vision for learning and achievement, as well as attending to details of running a good school. Mundane things like bathroom policies and bulletin boards.

In the upper-elementary hallway, there's still a 10-foot long poster where the fourth graders wrote their ideas on what they're thankful for. Even though it's six weeks old and needs replacing, I'm glad it's still up. It tells me that 10-year olds at this school are thankful for Gramma. They're glad they have shoes. And they love coming to school to have breakfast. Tyrone says: I am thankful for learning good.

After the meeting, a fifth grade teacher quietly notes that the school--prior to this year--did not celebrate Black History Month schoolwide, which seems incredible in a building where the population is 100% African-American and many children have never left their neighborhood. What a rich opportunity to share genuine narratives of turnaround and choice, to make children feel exceptional.

Special is good. There's work to do.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I taught in a middle school for almost 30 years. The last year I was there, I ended up teaching a class called Enrichment, which was code for Kids Who Are Falling Behind. The students in my class were compelled to give up one of their elective courses, and were placed in Enrichment in order to "catch up." The theory was that once all the uncompleted assignments were done, the student could return to gym class, happily part of the educational pack once again.

Why I ended up teaching Enrichment is a long story that usually requires an adult beverage--but suffice it to say, what I was doing in Enrichment didn't have much to do with expert instruction. It was about compliance, an adult standing over kids who were chronic homework avoiders, dangling the lackluster carrot of that elective class while breathing severely down their necks. The goal was never about mastering content. It was about filling in empty boxes in the grading program.

There were a handful of kids in the class who were genuinely struggling with the content and assignments. I was actually teaching them--sort of. They'd been avoiding homework because they didn't get it, and sometimes I was able--experimenting with different pathways to learning--to shed some light on required concepts and skills. They never caught up, however. They would go to math class and spend 50 minutes being confused, then come to Enrichment and do leftover homework using skills their classmates had tackled six weeks ago. It was hardly an efficient way to learn.

The majority of kids in the class simply didn't like doing homework. Many of them had been placed in Enrichment by their parents after getting a bad grade (with "bad grade" being a relative notion--for some parents, the first C was evidence that it was time to crack down). Like many schools, we used an online grading program, which allowed parents to track their child's work output and marks on a daily basis. Completing homework and maintaining acceptable grades became a cat and mouse game between anxious mom and manipulative 7th grader.

My Enrichment kids developed considerable expertise at being just far enough "behind" to stay in the class. I eventually began to see how much some of them enjoyed an hour during the day to read (one boy completed the Lord of the Rings series over two semesters), use the computer--or do work they enjoyed, in subjects where they were "caught up." When I tried to send one boy who had no uncompleted assignments back to his elective class, his mother insisted that he stay in Enrichment--to "teach him some responsibility."

What we were doing was exactly the opposite, of course. As Teacher Tom notes, in his wonderful blog about teaching pre-school:

Parents often talk about wanting to teach their kids to be responsible, then go about it by trying to boss them into it, picking for them those things for which we think they ought to feel responsible (e.g., "Clean up your room" "Make your bed."). But this mostly just teaches obedience, which does nothing to further the kind of responsibility we want children to take on. The problem is that it's almost impossible to feel responsible for things that one sees as unimportant. We might clean our room, but if we're taking responsibility for anything it's for keeping mom happy (which is not the same thing), even if we're not just doing it to avoid punishment.

One of the by-products of the accountability movement and high-tech data management tools--like on-line grade-books--is the elevation of filling in boxes over actual learning. The grade, the test score, the completed assignments--all manifestations of obedience--become the target.

And paradoxically, by putting the focus on things we can control, we are subtly demonstrating to our children that they're not really responsible, at all.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend